But does it even stand there still? My mother’s bones will be dust in the churchyard along with everyone I had ever known. Why, the grandchildren of those I knew are long dead.
For the first time since I saw those dreadful creatures on the ship of Death, I feel pain and tears fill my eyes and blur my sight. The pain seems all the more raw for its novelty.
Blurred vision or not, I know this place. Sea, hill and wood. They do not look so very different. But what now? What is this new wonder?
Just ahead of me a patch of woodland is lit from above by an unearthly light and in its centre is the pilot’s boy, just as he was when I saw him holding the lifeless nightingale from my bedroom window.
Here again, he holds the broken and bloodied body in both hands. The sadness of its killing comes back to me full force despite all that has gone between. He opens his lips and this time I can hear the words he speaks.
‘Let him go,’ he says.
And I have a sudden memory – a memory I had forgotten because I must have been so young when it occurred. I had woken with a nightmare when I was little more than a baby and my father had taken me outside in the moonlit orchard and we had heard a nightingale singing.
I had placed my little hand beside my ear so that I might listen more attentively and my father’s eyes had swum with tears as he laughed and hugged me tight and held his face to mine.
Tears flow from my own eyes now. I turn to look at my uncle and find that I can hate him no longer. I look back at the pilot’s son. I see them – I see all the spirits of the air pressing in on us, forming out of the blackness of the night sky, some fearsome, others beautiful, and even those that are fearsome are beautiful in their fearsomeness.
There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands. The trees shake gently as they pass by, the frost-coated moss shudders as they swim through the air and coil among the roots.
They are whirling and flying round and round, one moment in the ivy below, the next they are playing amid the stars. They are everywhere at once: everywhere and everything.
I look back at my uncle, the ancient mariner, and I see him slipping and dissolving into the woodland floor. His hair entwines about the ivy curling round the roots, and those roots coil in turn about his arms and legs.
Ivy fronds move through his clothes and push through his sagging flesh, dried now and more like the rags that are disappearing into the moss.
His ribs are like the twigs which push between them, his skull, as brittle as a sea urchin, cracks and shatters and collapses along with every part of his desiccated skeleton, so that it is soon hard to see where he had once been sitting. No one passing by could ever know there had been a human being there at all.
And I am glad to see him go. I am glad to see his suffering at an end. And in my gladness I know that I will share his fate and, kept in this unnatural state for an unnatural span of time, we will both, together, fade.
I have no material form to turn to dust, but I know now that I will join those spirits in the air and I am happy to do so. I see the wood below me and the moon shining on the calm sea and the little harbour of my home town; and then I am air, I am breath, I am silence. I am the moment before a dreaming sleeper wakes.
Also by Chris Priestley
The Dead of Winter
Mister Creecher
Through Dead Eyes
***
The Tales of Terror Collection:
Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror
Tales of Terror from the Black Ship
Tales of Terror from the Tunnel’s Mouth
Christmas Tales of Terror
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney
First published in Great Britain in September 2013
by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
This electronic edition published in September 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Chris Priestley 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The extract from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is taken from the 1858 edition,
published by Sampson Low, Son & Co, London.
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise
make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
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printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the
publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781408841747
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The Dead Men Stood Together Page 12
